Interesting issue. I wonder if it would be possible for a country to set up an extremely long copyright term (with a huge administrative fee) that would have to be respected under US law (and other adopters of the treaty).
I'm sure many music/movie studios and authors would gladly pay $100K to copyright each of their works internationally for 500 years...
Creative thinking, but I'd have to disagree with your conclusion. The present value of the additional years of copyright would be very low, especially taking into account 1. the probability that the work will still be a source of value 100 years (not the exact number, but for the sake of argument) in the future and 2.The possibility of changes in the local jurisdiction or US law over that time.
Your idea would mean paying 100k for the possibility of receiving some additional value 100 years in the future. The first 100 years of value are already protected under US law.
We should also consider the media message we'd be sending to the uninformed. A site called Hacker News opposes SOPA; what do you think the average person's response to that would be?
Frankly I think that HN is the wrong vehicle to bring attention to the matter strictly from a marketing/outreach perspective.
However, YC is a great channel to carry this message, and PG has already taken a very public stance on the issue.
Personally, I think this co-option of "hacker" to mean "semi-technical entrepreneur" is at best silly, and at worst leads to the sort of confusion of which you speak. Personally, I thought the hacker dojo should have been called "The Mountain View Computer Club" - it's got a nice retro feel. I mean, I'm a member, and I like the place, the people, and the organisation, but the name is unfortunate.
I think this is a separate discussion from reclaiming "hacker" to mean "technologist" - Hacker news is about semi-technical entrepreneurs, and we are rather different from people of similar technical skill levels that are not entrepreneurial. That's an important distinction. I mean, I introduce myself as "the tall guy" as a reference to "Every technical business has a tall dumb guy and a short smart guy." - It would be useful, I think, to have a word for 'semi-technical business guy" because while my compatriots could also call themselves hackers, I usually act in the semi-technical business guy role. (I mean, outside of my peer group, I'm a semi-business technical guy of unremarkable height- obviously, this is a continuum.)
This is kind of off topic but imho "everyone else" coopted hacker away from those of us who consider ourselves hackers.
And for the record I don't consider semi-technical entrepreneur to be the definition of hacker I apply to myself. For me it's more about someone who can take two things and make something new with them, regardless if they should be able to or not.
In any case, its a form of cultural identity, so its up to those who identify with it to define it. If the mainstream doesn't recognize it, its our responsibility to fix that.
>And for the record I don't consider semi-technical entrepreneur to be the definition of hacker I apply to myself. For me it's more about someone who can take two things and make something new with them, regardless if they should be able to or not.
Do you see the distinction I am trying to make, though? and how the crowd here, people that are interested in both business and technical problems is different from the sort of person that is only interested in technical problems, and why making that distinction would be useful?
Stop by #4clojure on freenode, the site devs hang out there (myself included) and happily give pointers on problems. Also, the main #clojure channel, while busy, is a great resource -- Clojure has a pretty welcoming community.
A link on the "Solutions" page to the next problem would streamline things some. I followed the top solvers so I could see how far off my solution ended up.
Once you solve a problem you get a link to the solutions, but if you hit "Back" you end up back on the problem anew, with no link to move on.
Takes some tab management to keep the "next problem" link and see the other solutions.
I think that's backwards. Make Science/Engineering cheaper and liberal arts more expensive... arts degrees should be considered luxury items: nice to have but not strictly necessary. I think many people would be better off not going to University than get an arts degree, whereas there is huge societal benefit to pushing out more scientists and engineers.
Liberal arts should exist, just at a much smaller (frankly, more reasonable wrt actual demand) scale.
If the objective is to maximize short-term economic gains, then yes, that would work.
If the objective is to create well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens, then no, that is a horrible idea.
Regardless, I think it's a false dichotomy. Why does one have to be expensive while the other is cheap? And why can't someone get both a liberal arts education and a "practical" education? I see no reason why a student can't pay 5k for a 2-3 year liberal arts degree, and then go on to (competitively-priced) a 2-3 year engineering degree.
> If the objective is to create well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens, then no, that is a horrible idea.
Why is it that everyone thinks a STEM education means you are automatically not well-rounded or cross-disciplinary? There are universities with STEM programs that mitigate this problem successfully by creating the right requirements for the degree.
As an example, the requirements for breadth were FAR more stringent at my university for technical fields than for the humanities/social sciences. The 'science' breadth requirement for a humanities major could be satisfied by first-semester courses like the introductory Nutritional Science course, but the breadth requirements for technical majors required that students end up taking at least a couple 3rd/4th year courses in liberal arts fields (which in turn had lower-level prerequisites, naturally). This resulted in the inverse problem from my POV, whereby the majors generally assumed to create well-rounded students actually failed to do so.
Furthermore, being well-rounded is a lot more than what you study in college IMO. A well-rounded citizen has to continually invest in 'upkeep' that earns them that label. The most well-rounded folks I know read throughout their life (often across a broad set of topics), continually invest in their education on their own time through this reading, keep up on current-events, and so forth. I don't see a lack of liberal arts education precluding these activities or any other activities that might contribute to being well-rounded.
> And why can't someone get both a liberal arts education and a "practical" education?
I generally agree that this would be ideal, but it is also constrained by how much money we have as a society. Remember - you and I are contributing our own funds indirectly to subsidize this same education, and it is certainly not cheap these days (see other comments on cost of education). The trick of course is to strike the right balance and realize a good return on that educational investment. Personally, I can see value in something like a Minor in a field that is completely different than one's Major, but I don't see the benefit being much greater if one were to get two full degrees.
> > If the objective is to create well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens, then no, that is a horrible idea.
Why is it that everyone thinks a STEM education means you are automatically not well-rounded or cross-disciplinary? There are universities with STEM programs that mitigate this problem successfully by creating the right requirements for the degree.
...
> And why can't someone get both a liberal arts education and a "practical" education?
I generally agree that this would be ideal, but it is also constrained by how much money we have as a society.
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So, a) we'll require everyone take liberal arts, to solve the problem of b) it's too expensive for everyone to take liberal arts?
The main issue I've heard people cite with majoring in the liberal arts is that liberal arts majors don't make enough money to cover costs. Raising the costs of being a liberal arts major seems like a pretty roundabout way of solving that problem.
I think the key there is the plural. If you're given two subsets of the population, where:
Subset A roughly corresponds to the current population's mix of educational backgrounds, and
Subset B is the transformation of A where all liberal arts majors have been replaced with STEM graduates,
I think it's obvious that subset A would be more "cross-disciplinary" and "well-rounded" taken as a group. It's not that individual liberal arts majors are more well rounded, it's that having a well-rounded collective of citizens is important.
> But, how much do liberal arts majors contribute to said "well-rounded collective" and at what cost?
Are you asking how they contribute to well-roundedness, or are you asking to value their individual contributions to society while ignoring contributions to well-roundedness as a valuable asset? How they contribute to well-roundedness is handled with the whole Subset A vs Subset B thing, I think. In regards to value -- I'm pretty sure that Hunter Thompson guy was good to have around. I dunno.
As to the cost: I guess that depends on whether you view liberal arts majors as a detriment to society, or at least intrinsically inferior to STEM majors. If they're equal then they're no additional cost, because their education costs exactly the same dollar amount.
> And, that's ignoring the benefit of having this "rounded" within individuals instead of across groups.
Certainly well-rounded individuals are important. But unless everyone is forced to be dual-degree, there will inevitably end up being biases towards the main major -- and I say this as a well-rounded STEM grad.
And doesn't requiring the well-roundedness to be at the individual level ignore the benefit of having some number of single-focus specialists within a society? It's not like Salman Rushdie spends his spare time proving P=NP, or Dijkstra's out writing papers on critical race theory.
>> But, how much do liberal arts majors contribute to said "well-rounded collective" and at what cost?
> Are you asking how they contribute to well-roundedness
Yes.
> How they contribute to well-roundedness is handled with the whole Subset A vs Subset B thing
Not clear. You're claiming that an LA degree has some "roundedness" value. That's not obvious. And, even if it's true, that doesn't imply that we need a lot of LA degrees to get whatever benefit there is. For example, how much worse off would we be with half as many English majors?
> I'm pretty sure that Hunter Thompson guy was good to have around.
I'd agree, but would ask whether his existence depended on the existence of a large number of LA majors. I'd point out that similar folks existed before we had a lot of LA majors and we don't have more Hunter Thompsons now.
> If they're equal then they're no additional cost, because their education costs exactly the same dollar amount.
Huh? It doesn't matter whether LA majors cost more or less than STEM majors. The question is the relationship between the cost of LA majors and the benefits of LA majors. (There's a similar question about STEM majors.)
It's interesting that we had a thread a while back about how China was better because its political leadership had engineering degrees....
> You're claiming that an LA degree has some "roundedness" value.
I think I understand our point of disagreement.
I don't mean to claim LA majors have a "roundedness" value. I'm claiming that the collective average of STEM and LA leads to a rounded group, assuming "roundedness" in this case is considered to mean equally proficient in the diverse areas of knowledge.
As a metaphor, assume we have a bag full of red, purple, and blue marbles, where the purple is equivalent to roundedness (having equal amounts of red and blue). Replacing all of the red marbles with perfectly-purple ones actually decreases the purpleness of the bag -- it shifts the average color towards blue. Even if we give the blue ones with "a bit more 'rounded'" purple, to echo your call, the average remains shifted more towards blue than it was when there was red to balance it out.
LA majors don't have a roundedness value -- pure-LA is as unrounded as pure-STEM. I'm generally working under the assumption that "roundedness" means that you're knowledgeable in many areas, instead of only knowledgeable in a single one. Replacing a specific set of specialists with jacks-of-all-trades leaves the group with less average knowledge in the direction of the replaced specialists' knowledge base.
You could be arguing to make everyone completely and equally rounded/purple -- replacing both the blues and the reds, so that everyone would graduate with both a full LA degree and a full STEM degree. But your call for adding "a bit more 'rounded' to STEM majors" instead of having LA majors didn't sound like that, and making everyone be dual-degree seems a bit infeasible.
They're both probably right, investors can be more selective with the glut of entrepreneurs while still paying out top dollar for great companies/deals.
The tricky thing is that project management is a very mature industry, so saying that I'm going to build a badass PM tool says even less -- my thought was to focus on the reason for building the tool. My take is that project management in the software space fails because the stacks of tools companies use are rarely interoperable. Efficiency and predictability are hugely dependent on a tight coupling between the different phases of software dev -- and that's where there's still huge amounts of room to innovate.
I hear what you're saying, I just don't know how to rephrase that question to focus on what's innovative...
edit: just to be clear, I think you're right. I'm going to takle this this all day to try to make it clearer. Thanks.
I'm sure many music/movie studios and authors would gladly pay $100K to copyright each of their works internationally for 500 years...